Wireless communication allows people to communicate to or from any given location, wherein wireless customers may select from an array of useful ancillary services to augment the advantages of mobile telecommunications. Wireless service providers create and maintain vast wireless networks to support such communications services for subscriber customers, and strive to maximize network utilization and the attendant revenues generated by providing uninterrupted wireless service for subscribers, while also attempting to minimize operating costs and mitigate dropped calls and other service problems. In this regard, wireless service providers have found that allowing too many calls to be dropped will upset subscribers and may lead to revenue losses and may hinder efforts to attract new subscribers. Efficiently maintaining and engineering radio frequency (RF) network with respect to the quality of RF communications signals and equipment is thus an important aspect of wireless network operation.
In general, wireless networks consist of a number of geographic regions referred to as cells, where wireless RF communications within each cell is provided by a base station that communicates with cell phones and other wireless user equipment currently located within the cell. The base station generally includes a base transceiver station and a base station controller that are operative to communicate with devices in a given sector of the sell on one or more channels or frequencies for various band classes. One or more base stations are typically served by a switching system such as a mobile switching center (MSC) that operates in conjunction with a visitor location register (VLR) database and a home location register (HLR) database to support communications services for RF devices communicating with the associated base station(s).
In the past, wireless service providers have tried various techniques to assess the RF network performance of a given area. However, these techniques have thus far provided only partially complete information, and the assessment of the actual wireless communications quality is largely based on assumptions, whereby the information is often of only marginal vale in deciding whether to adjust or upgrade the equipment serving a given location. One such technique employs RF prediction software that inputs the topology and geography of an area, the base station location and transmit power, street and building locations, and predicts what a wireless device might experience at different locations. This approach, however, is often able to predict the RF performance of a given area with only marginal accuracy. Another method involves a set of test RF devices that are driven around the mobile network to gather data on the RF environment encountered during the test. This approach can be used to generate a plot of the area to indicate certain aspects of the RF environment for the locations at which the data was collected. This technique suffers from the high cost of moving the test apparatus around within the tested area, and the time needed to collect and plot the data. Another technique uses measurements collected at the mobile network on the current state of the system and its different components in order to characterize the network quality. Such measurements may be used to draw very general conclusion about the RF environment, but specific analysis of actual RF conditions are not possible using this methodology. Thus, the conventional RF quality assessment techniques are of limited value in attempting to trouble-shoot RF network conditions or to determine whether adjustments or upgrades are needed, and there is an ongoing need for improved methods and systems for assessing the quality of RF communications links in a wireless communications system for use in grid development and network optimization.